Casting the right actor for a role often means finding someone who matches the character description in a script, but Josh Lundquist didn’t know if that was possible for his series “Best Foot Forward.”
“It sounds silly in retrospect, but this was four years ago,” Lundquist recalled recently. “At the time, it simply didn’t occur to me, it would even be possible to hire an amputee actor.”
Lundquist was helping to cast a fictionalized version of his younger self, the lead role in “Best Foot Forward,” which debuts Friday on Apple TV+. Loosely based on Lundquist’s memoir, “Just Don’t Fall,” the series centers on a 12-year-old boy who is the only child at his school with a limb difference. Lundquist, who is an executive producer on the series, lost his left leg to bone cancer when he was 10.
The character’s disability is at the core of “Best Foot Forward,” but Lundquist’s expectations were measured. “I just thought like, ‘Oh, of course we’re going to have to cast an able-bodied kid and have a body double,’” he said. “Because that was all I’d ever seen my whole life.”
To Lundquist’s delight, the production company behind the show, Muse Entertainment, was intent on finding an actor who shared the character’s disability. After casting the newcomer Logan Marino as the fictional Josh, Lundquist’s perspective on what was possible evolved dramatically.
“By the time we got to where we were green lit, and we were starting to look for crew, I was fully converted to the importance of authentic representation both in front of and behind the camera,” he said.
What happens in front of the camera often dominates the discourse around representation in entertainment. While the news media has in recent years paid some attention to the lack of opportunity for actors with disabilities, there is still plenty of room for progress.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 26 percent of American adults have a disability, but according to a GLAND report released earlier this year, characters with disabilities, including children, constituted only 2.8 percent of series regulars across all scripted broadcast TV shows in the 2021-22 TV season. (The report did not take a comprehensive look at disability representation on cable and streaming services.) Earlier GLAND research, from 2021, found that the majority of TV characters with disabilities are played by non-disabled actors.
When it comes to actors, “agents know that sometimes you want people with disabilities, and they have those people already on file,” he said. But when the producers contacted unions and guilds that represent crew positions, he said, they found that most of them didn’t track which of their members have disabilities.
So Lundquist resorted to putting call-outs on social media and connecting with disability advocacy groups like Respectability. “We’re not a staffing agency,” said Lauren, who runs Respectability’s Entertainment Lab, a workshop for professionals with disabilities working in TV and film. “We just found ourselves in this position where studios and individual productions are reaching out to us saying ‘We want help with this.’” Seven people who worked on “Best Foot Forward”.
“Best Foot Forward” isn’t the first show to have included people with disabilities on both sides of the camera. Several shows over the past few years, including Sun dance Now’s “This Close,” about two best friends who are deaf, and Netflix’s “Special,” a comedy about a gay man with cerebral palsy, were created by and starred people with disabilities. “Best Foot Forward” builds on the groundwork laid by those shows.
“What makes ‘Best Foot Forward’ unique is the intentionality behind bringing in disabled crew,” she explained. “Crew across all levels, from production assistants to directors.”
“No one person felt responsible for representing an entire community,” Anne added. “It also freed us up to just be funny.”
Unlike on many productions, the writers and crew with disabilities on “Best Foot Forward” weren’t tasked with also educating non-disabled collaborators and advocating accessibility. That was someone’s actual job. Kia Amar served as the production accessibility coordinator, a relatively new role in Hollywood that is generally filled by disabled professionals who consult on onscreen authenticity and how to accommodate crew members with disabilities.
The first step on set, Amar said, is to survey the crew and gauge how to make the production as accessible as possible. “I’ll list things out like: ‘Check the box: Would you like access to a sensory-friendly room?’” Amar said. “‘Do you need your scripts or documents in dark mode? Do you need a dyslexia-accessible font?’” Then comes crew training that covers disability-related language and how to create an inclusive space.
“It’s not the disabled folks who need to learn anything,” Amar said. “It’s all the non-disabled folks who need to continue to be in this space of, like, ‘Here’s how to not be frightened of thinking that you’re going to mess up.’”
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